“That’s what I call innovation,” says Glyn Moody, who links to this “hilarious visual image of selected 2009 patents…”

This whole patent framework is obviously causing great harm to everyone except monopolies (which swap mutual protection in bulk) and patent trolls (or lawyers). To make matters worse, this system has gone underground (secretive) and having received a dosage of Microsoft influence, it now refuses to obey the law and to reveal to the public what is happening behind closed doors.

On the 8th of November one of our members, Gordon Harrison, submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO). The request was for a complete list of the organisations that made submissions for the report ‘The Way Ahead; A Strategy for Copyright in the Digital Age’, together with a copy of each submission. The IPO had already published some of the submissions but according to their website a number of submissions were made in confidence. Gordon asked that they be made public under the the terms of the Freedom of Information Act.

[...]

We have looked at the list of organisations that made public submissions, such as the BBC and Microsoft, but there are some surprising ommissions from that list, such as Google and Yahoo.

This is not the end of it, but the above clearly shows that the UK-IPO works for unaccountable corporations, not for people. That’s just a shame.

The EPO has had people marching in the streets on several occasions. At one stage (last year) it was EPO staff protesting against the EPO and this year it was a protest against the likes of Monsanto (‘pig patents’), a company which is strongly backed by the Gates Foundation and recently fell under investigation for market abuse. For the EPO to back Monsanto’s plot would in some way be abusive as well. TechDirt has some more information on this (including many comments).

How Monsanto Used Gene Patents To Corner The Market In Seeds

Dark Helmet points us to the news of an Associated Press investigation into how Monsanto basically cornered the market in seeds by using gene patents and coercive licensing agreements that basically make it impossible to grow certain products without having to first reach a restrictive agreement with Monsanto. And they did this all in about a dozen years. Gene patents are already troubling enough, and reading this report on how Monsanto used its gene patents to basically wipe out all competition is quite telling in exactly how patents can be used to significantly harm a market.

Yesterday we wrote about Eolas suing everyone in Texas, having previously sued Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Another Eolas-like parasite has just launched a fresh attack on many companies that include Microsoft.

An east-Texas company, BetaNet LLC, has filed a patent-infringement suit against Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, IBM, SAP, and a dozen other companies.

Make no mistake; Gates and Microsoft invest billions of dollars in the world's biggest patent troll. Increasingly, as time goes on and evidence mounts, the patent systems seem like a government-approved racket. Companies like Monsanto potentially kill a vast number of people using their patents. It may be worse in the pharmaceutical industry whose patents Bill Gates is also backing [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. This industry makes an obscene amount of money from people’s deaths (externality) and this usually gets defended by the “R&D” lies, despite the fact that most of the money is pocketed, a lot of the research is already publicly funded (sometimes invested in through academia and then passed to private hands), and a huge amount of money is spent on just marketing (imposed deception disguised as information) and unimportant products for rich people (like anti-wrinkle creams). The scams of the big pharmaceutical companies are a broad topic in their own right and are worth exploring in isolation one day. █

The criminal enterprise known as Microsoft finds itself embarrassingly exposed in the courtroom, for the IRS belatedly (decades too late) targets the company in an effort to tackle massive tax evasions

A look at some of last week's patent news, with imperative responses that criticise corporate exploitation of patents for protectionism (excluding and/or driving away the competition using legal threats)

Vista 10 to bring new ways for spies (and other crackers) to remotely access people's computers and remotely modify the binary files on them (via Windows Update, which for most people cannot be disabled)